Share this:

Reports have appeared on our Ewok-o-tron that suggests Ewoks will soon be available as companion characters in SWTOR, via the 2.3 patch. To unlock the ‘wok, you need 1 million space cash and a legacy level of 40, apparently. Tweek, for that is her Ewok name, will be a tanky/healer sort of companion. That, I know, will make someone in this world very happy.

Such a sad thing to see/hear so many people play a Massively Multyplayer Online game for the story. And I’m not blaming the players, I’m just thinking at how short-sighted and dumb MMO developers can be. It seems to me that what most MMO devs aim for is just to make a single-player game that supports multyplayer and has an excuse to keep charging you for more than just the initial purchase. The last thing on their mind is to make a real MMO experience. Anyway, sorry for the rant.

I spent nothing on SWTOR and got twenty hours or so of entertainment out of it. Although admittedly there was some padding in there, it’s not a bad deal.

What is the real MMO experience, anyway? Most early MMOs had limited team mechanics. Many had *none* besides a rudimentary group system, if that; and the only risk/reward incentive you had to team up was finding a boss monster too tough to take on your own. The main difference those games had with theme parks of today are the difficulty and having an actual uncharted world to explore.

Those things were, to me personally (ymmv) the real MMO experience. You were a dude or dudette in an unknown world. You had very limited information, and you didn’t team up looking for one healer and one tank for fat exp and mad loot, you teamed up with two other people so you could trade knowledge and have a better shot exploring this world together.

That, to me, was what it was all about. Dynamics based in large part on obscurity. I’ve played MMOs in which absolutely everyone believed certain things for facts, based their entire strategies and characters around those facts, and those facts proved to be completely wrong years later when the source code was made accessible or whatever. How cool is that?

Nowadays, with high-speed Internet, hundreds of thousands of players if not millions on a single game, third-party addons out of the wazzoo, open betas lasting for months, everything is figured out before the game is even released. Even procedural generation is broken down with probabilities or reverse engineering. No matter how you design your game, I don’t think the above MMO experience could be replicated in today’s world.

Worth pointing out that unless they’ve started selling a credit cap unlock in the last 2 months (the last time I played), that Ewok companion is going to be exclusive to subscribers, as the free-play tiers have a cap on their wallet that limits them to a maximum spacebucks balance of 350 thousand. Any credits earned beyond that go into escrow until the player’s balance goes below the limit or they subscribe.

Of course, a free player meeting the other requirements could (presumably) temporarily open a subscription, gather the money, pay the million for the Ewok, then cancel the following month, but that would be effectively be the same as buying the damn thing on the in-game cash store (were it available).

Of course, the REAL question is if you can romance it, and if yes, whether it’s open to either gender.

Yup, so basically what you’d expect a tank to be. But how on earth does it make sense for an Ewok to direct attacks towards himself and soak it up? He’s tiny and relatively puny, surely? A Jedi knight letting an Ewok take the blows is just stupid.

Tanking can take different forms. Hit based tanking (basically lots of hp and armor, taking hits), dodge based tanking (taunt abilities forces the ennemies to attack you, but you avoid a lot of their hits)…

It feels a bit to me like when you were in high school joking around with your friends and Mr. White, the imposingly tall maths teacher, questions exactly what was so funny and invites you to the front of the class to share your little joke to the entire room. And while you’re there suggests maybe you’d like to solve the trigonometry problem on the whiteboard only you neglected your homework and don’t know what to do and suddenly you realise you weren’t funny and you don’t know and you can’t talk.

So, a companion that is a member of a race who are just barely above the “pointy sticks and fire are useful things” stage that is wandering the space lanes as an assassin a thousand(?) years before anyone knew her race existed. Lovely.

1) Find a bunch of enemies I have no way of beating.
2) Tell Gleep or Tweek or whatever to attack them.
3) Go make some tea, then drink said tea.
4) Uninstall the game, because everything else after that would be anti-climatic.